123 - death and similar delusions
about 6 years ago and for about 6 months, i experienced the stress-induced delusion that i was already dead. i believed for a time that the world just hadn't caught up yet, hadn't realised the facts of my mortality. i'd slipped through the gaps of the moment i was meant to be torn into a million pieces.
and thus i was a little bit invincible.
those six months were paradoxically some of the most reckless and the most cautious of my entire life. i was consumed by the leftover fear of a moment that almost happened. i had panic attacks getting into cars. my claustrophobia became a thousand times worse. i developed little stress tics and paranoias.
but... i was already dead, wasn't i? these were just the compulsions of a body fooling itself with an imitation of life.
i stopped caring about a lot of things. social norms, expectations, relationships, dreams and ideals. a lot of them had only ever existed in my head in the first place of course, but nevertheless there was a ritual to leaving them behind. i was dead. i didn't need those.
but in the end... well, the end didn't come. the universe never caught up with me, the reaper never came to collect its due. the delusion began to fade. i had not broken my neck six months earlier, and thus i had to be a person again now. a living one.
pity about all those trappings of life i threw away. good riddance to some, but not all.
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i've recently begun watching a show of some (in)famy, at the urging of a friend and a (hopefully) friend-to-be. the two of them are also currently running a podcast about said show, which frankly is far more entertaining than the show itself, but i'm told it gets better. or at least weirder.
at the end of the second episode, the narrating character delivers what has become one of my favourite pieces of exposition in any piece of media i've seen, if only for its sheer absurdity in the moment;
"To someone on the outside peering in, it would have looked like there was four people in that booth. But I was there."
"And I can tell you, really... there were only three."
there's a little more after this line, but none of it really explains what the hell he meant by that. there's a really bland read you can make to the effect of 'they only had eyes for each other'... but even in that context, the delivery feels off.
luckily, there's a podcast about that!
the experts have two theories. the fun one, which was unfortunately debunked earlier in this same episode (but we can pretend it wasn't), is that the narrating character is, in fact, a ghost. (i was gonna elaborate on this, but... nah, go watch the show). anyway, that's the blatant tie-in to the first part of this post.
the second, more interesting theory is that this narrating character refers to himself as if he isn't present in the story... because he isn't. he is the narrator, and thus cannot be his own character.
(they do a far better job of explaining this than i will, so... go listen to the podcast too!).
whichever way you interpret it, i really like that line. it suits my taste for cliche drama and poetry. i am easily suckered by mediocre lines delivered with enthusiastically self-aware scorn.
anyway, there's our blatant tie in to the next part of this post. please imagine a scene transition of some kind.
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i have an unfortunate and uncomfortable knack for correctly predicting people.
it's much less useful than it sounds. its one of those survival-oriented coping mechanisms that only works as intended within a very specific niche, and primarily causes trouble the rest of the time.
i'm just good at joining the dots. sometimes i'm conscious of doing it - my housemate refers to this as me using 'heuristics' on people, a word we've since started using as shorthand when i have to explain how i uncannily know something. i can put together a picture of where people were, what they were doing, when, sometimes why - with annoying accuracy, out of very sparse information.
its a shame that picture so often resolves into a cognitive hazard. quite often there was a reason i wasn't told, even if only passively. and y'know, there's the whole invasion of privacy angle, which is a very justified criticism. my only defense is that i rarely do this on purpose.
...sometimes it's less explicit than that, though. i just get... hunches, and i can't explain why. it's like the involuntary flinch when a shadow suddenly looms from behind you, even though nothing of substance has threatened you yet. i tend to get an inexplicable feeling of dread before personal disasters, whether they affect me or the people close to me.
once again, this isn't useful. everyone knows that trying to avert a foretold doom always turns out to be the thing that brings about said doom. ultimately, it just means i can't sleep.
so overall, it's not that special of a talent. just a knack for creating more problems out of nothing, really.
but... combine it with the lingering feeling that perhaps you were never meant to be here in the first place, combine it with a consistent, lifelong isolation... and it becomes very easy to feel like you were never part of the story at all.
you're just an observer. here to predict. here to be the means by which other people narrate their part.
it's a lonely existence. and one i am quite desperate to escape.
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its difficult to separate my fears and my hopes from reality.
i fear i've already fucked everything, tired people out, burnt the bridges and salted the earth behind me. i hope none of that is true. the reality, somewhere in between, is always drowned out. i can't trust myself.
what good is an unreliable narrator? comedic effect maybe, compelling narrative if played well. but is it worth it when your actual life is on the line? who's enjoying this?
so i lean into the hope, and then i lean into the fear, and then i claw my way back into hope and pray that i'm spending some of that time in the reality between them.
...i don't really know where i'm going with this. this isn't anything new to y'all.
perhaps i've rambled enough. i never feel like i've quite managed to make my point with these, but by now i think thats become part of the bit.
i hope i see you tomorrow, either way. i still smile when i think of you.